Inside of a Diamond

An Apostle Islands postcard

CRAAACK!!! And I sat bolt upright in my sleeping bag.

It is well after midnight and I was alone on the ice of Lake Superior northeast of Basswood Island. We were filming a segment of a television show on winter in the Apostle Islands, dogsledding and ice fishing among the islands —expensive camera gear, sound equipment, that couldn’t be left out on the ice overnight without someone to watch it but was too cumbersome to carry back and forth each night to town across the ice. I volunteered to stay. Alone. Now, in the dark, it sounded like the crust of the earth was cracking beneath me. I opened the zipper of the tent and peered out. What I saw was magic.

Overhead, the sky was dancing with northern lights. Recent thaws had left the lake ice snowless, clear as glass. The lights were so intense they were reflecting off of the ice and dancing overheard, a dome of light nearly all the way to each horizon.

I crawled out of the tent, walked far out on to the ice and laid flat on my back. It was like being inside of a diamond. For as long as I could lie there, I forgot completely about the cold, the late hour, the cracking lake ice. I barely remembered to breathe.

There are moments in your life that fly by unnoted and unremembered, and there are moments that even as you are living through them you know will never be forgotten. As I laid on the ice that night surrounded by beauty, I knew without a doubt which kind of moment this was.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).